Profile: The seat covers the north-western suburbs of Sheffield and the steel town of Stocksbridge, set to the north west of Sheffield on the edge of the moors. The northern part of the seat drawn from the borough of Barnsley covers the rural villages in the foothills of the pennines around the market town of Penistone and, to the east, the former mining village of Dodworth. Most of the seat is made up of traditional industrial areas, loyal to Labour, though with the decline of coal and steel and the old allegiences that went with it, there is more new build housing and commuters into Sheffield and Barnsley.

Politics: By the standards of South Yorkshire, one of Labour`s most reliable bedrocks in England, this counts as a marginal. Labour have only just over 40% of the vote and it is only the division of opposition support - once between Conservative and Liberal Democrat, now between Conservatives and UKIP that keeps the seat in Labour hands..

Current MP

ANGELA SMITH (Labour) Born 1961, Grimsby. Educated at Tollbar Secondary and Nottingham University. Former College Lecturer. Former Sheffield councillor. First elected as MP for Sheffield Hillsborough in 2005. PPS to Yvette Cooper 2007-2010.

Past Results

2010

Con:

14516 (31%)

Lab:

17565 (38%)

LDem:

9800 (21%)

BNP:

2207 (5%)

Oth:

2428 (5%)

MAJ:

3049 (7%)

2005*

Con:

6890 (15%)

Lab:

23477 (51%)

LDem:

12234 (27%)

BNP:

2010 (4%)

Oth:

1273 (3%)

MAJ:

11243 (25%)

2001

Con:

7801 (18%)

Lab:

24170 (57%)

LDem:

9601 (23%)

UKIP:

964 (2%)

MAJ:

14569 (34%)

1997

Con:

7707 (15%)

Lab:

30150 (57%)

LDem:

13699 (26%)

MAJ:

16451 (31%)

*There were boundary changes after 2005, name changed from Sheffield, Hillsborough

@Maxim I agree that UKIP took far more from the Tories in this seat. I imagine that this seat will eventually be lost by Labour unless it is butchered in a boundary review (which is quite possible). I imagine to people with much longer political memories than me find it very surreal that this seat is a far better Tory prospect than their traditional stronghold of Sheffield Hallam.

This is the kind of seat where Corbyn could do real damage to Labour. As I have said on other threads the constituencies put most in jeopardy by the hard left’s take over of the Labour party are seats where the 2015 winning Labour vote share was only in the high 30s or low 40s with fairly large Tory and UKIP votes, very white British, low public sector employment (i.e. this seat). The hype about Labour losing Oldham West and Royton (or Ogmore or Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough for that matter) though was and is ridiculous because Labour was well clear of 50% in all three in 2015.

I don’t think Corbyn will do overwhelmingly worse than Miliband in 2020 in terms of vote share (assuming he’s still around) because he is still overwhelmingly popular with the labour activist base. But I imagine that his leadership will push the Tory vote share up and cause the opposition to coalesce more than usual around the most viable non-Labour candidate in marginal seats.

Under the 2011 proposals the boundaries in this area were considerably redrawn. Approx 2/3 of the seat was to go into a new seat called Sheffield North and Dodworth (safe LAB) and 1/3 into Sheffield Hallam, which was to become Sheffield Hallam and Penistone – a seat that was notionally LD if contested in 2010 but in 2015 would, I imagine, have been a three way marginal… Of course it won’t necessarily be the same this time.

This seat is very unlikely to survive the boundary review, but if something like it does, it’s really not promising for the Tories. It was bigged up as a possible gain in 2010 and even (by some people) in 2015, but they are now a distant second, only just ahead of UKIP.

The Sheffield section is poor for the Conservatives and not improving – what little vote they had seems to have gone to UKIP, along with much of the Lib Dem vote and some of the Labour vote.

The Conservative vote comes from around Penistone, but they have failed to make advances in either Penistone East or West. Hard to say in Dodworth as locally it’s dominated by independents, but there’s no evidence of advance there either.

Even if UKIP disappear, their vote is very unlikely to go en bloc to the Conservatives; while some UKIPpers here are former Tories, many loathe the party for historical reasons.

And I’m unconvinced that Miliband being a Doncaster MP had any real impact on the local votes; he wasn’t often in Barnsley or Sheffield, and the Labour shares held up well in the 2016 local elections.

Plus, as Rivers says, if the seat does survive, taking wards from Sheffield or other bits of Barnsley will hinder the Tories still further. Their only hope would be adding in bits of Kirklees, which would be justifiable but unlikely due to the South – West Yorkshire boundary. And while the bits of Kirklees near the border are good for the Tories, they’re not that good – just adding one or two wards in wouldn’t be enough, they’d need to swap out a chunk of Sheffield, by which point you’re pretty much adding a bit of Barnsley to the Colne Valley seat which the party already holds.

Maxim
I agree with Wardofdreams, the UKIP vote here isn’t monolithically Tory, in fact this is precisely the type of WWC seat where I’d guess UKIP probably did more harm to Labour than the Cons if anything.

As for the “Milliband bounce” if such a phenomena occurred I doubt it had a major effect. You can’t really compare to Kinnock in 92 since h was in fact Welsh, party leaders always over perform in the region they are from. While Milliband did represent a South Yorkshire seat he isn’t from South Yorkshire and very clearly so, in fact I’m not sure if you recall but many people were speculating that Milliband was such an obvious parachute into his seat it might actually harm Labour in South Yorkshire. That turned out to not be the case but to spin it on its head and claim this actually helped Labour here? Seems a bit of a stretch.

“If you look at 2015 here UKIP doesn’t seem to have hurt Labour much, if at all. Whereas the Tories clearly suffered from the UKIP spikes in South Yorkshire”

As always there is a lot of churn going on. Its very possible that UKIP did more harm to Lab here but Lab clawed a little bit of support back from the Tories and where the overwhelming beneficiaries of the Lib Dem collapse? I’m not saying that happened but you cant really say “UKIP vote up, Lab vote stable, Tory vote down UKIP thus took more votes from the Tories” its never that simple.

“What I’m saying is that in a lot of seats where the opposition was split between UKIP and Cons in 2015, I don’t see it remaining that way”

I’m inclined to agree but I think the votes will split somewhere in the ballpark of 50/50. To be in serious contention the Tories need to pick up 75% or more of the UKIP vote and I just don’t see it.

Of course it is but we all know that many UKIP voters especially in seats like this are former Labour voters, that’s not new news, the contentious issue is how many and that is up for debate and their have been many disagreements on this site over that issue.

Ultimately its impossible to know for certain where the vote increases/decreases came from especially since some of the increase will be first time voters and some of the decrease will be people who voted in the past but didn’t in 2015. As I said an awful lot of churn, the only thing that is guarantied is that a sizable % of that UKIP vote (how sizable I don’t know) will have come from ex Labour voters and a sizable chunk of those “Red Kippers” wont vote for the Tories.

Its within the realms of possibility but I’d say its very top end of what the Tories can hope for and they’ll need a fair few ex kippers to pull it off. Even the very best polls only just have the Tories sneaking this.

One thing that became clear to me as the night went on, was that Cons actually did better in Northern targets where UKIP actually STOOD a candidate than where they stood down (upon which their remaining ‘can’t vote Tory’ voters just went for / back to Labour and helped stave off Tory advances).

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